On Wed 11 Feb '04 at 19:42 (Plake) wrote:

I'm going to Utah for 2wks in March and want to take advantage of the
USD/GBP exchange rate by buying new ski & board gear:

Rossignol B2/Fritschi Diamir £519 at Snow+Rock, £397 at rei.com
K2 Recon/Salomon SP3/Salomon Dialogue £664 at Snow+Rock, £355 at
rei.com!

So I have a couple of questions:

1) I suspect the US stores are pressurised by the European
manufacturers not to sell gear to Europeans. Is this true, and will
paying cash at the store help?


Never had any problems with this in REI, AnyMountain and Patagonia in CA.

REI is a great shop btw.

2) If I declare the stuff at customs when I bring it back to the UK,
what will the import duty cost?

So I presume you've looked at the HM Customs and Excise website?

I did a bit of research before I went to CA and as far as I could tell from:

http://www.hmce.gov.uk/forms/notices/1.htm

The maximum amount of stuff you could bring in without paying duty was £145.

I also tried to work out what duty I'd have to pay if I bought something
expensive and declared it. I couldn't really determine that from the website,
though *somewhere* there is some link describing classes of goods, but they
still don't explain how much it costs for each class.

You could phone them up and ask, but I'd recomend doing that from a phonebox,
not using your real name, and not declaring when you're traveling

3) If I don't declare it, what are the chances of being caught? And
what happens if you are?

Well, sadly, as one of my friends has noticed in the airports in the UK,
there's a type of person that customs seems to stop in the Green channel, and
if you're Caucasian, you're probably not one of them. If you happen to land at
the same time as a flight from Jamaica you'll see what he means.

If you use your ski's out in Utah then it'll be hard to tell the difference
between them and a pair of ski's you bought in the UK and took out...

However one of my other friend's parents once got caught with some goods and he
explained how it worked (they then went on to always declare).

If you don't declare and get caught, they'll do the fines, duty and tax to the
line, and you'll be at customs for hours.

If you do declare, they'll be happy to have something to do, and work the duty
out like this:

"How much do you want to declare?"
"Er, £397"
"Call it 300"
"So 17.5% of 300, well, call it 10% as I don't have my calculator with me"
....etc


Note that with goods being _so_ much cheaper in the States, and the pound
being so strong, you may find that even with paying the duty it's still
significantly cheaper. - I guess it all comes down to what your risk
tolerance is.

You know, I always thought we lived in a free market until I started
traveling to the states, seems that the free market is really to protect
western governments, rather than set market prices.


Happy Shopping.


Alun.